Abstract: Hegel seeks to overturn Kant’s conclusion that our
knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they
are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires
distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic limits: First,
we can have knowledge only within the “bounds of experience.” Second, we
cannot have knowledge of objects that would be accessible only to a divine
intellectual intuition, even though the faculty of reason requires us to
conceive of such objects. Hegel aims to drive a wedge between these two
characterizations, showing that we can have knowledge beyond Kant’s bounds of
experience, yet without need of divine intuition. And attention to such
knowledge is supposed to show that we have no legitimate need to even conceive
of divine intuition and its objects—and no need to conclude that our own
knowledge is restricted by comparison, or that we cannot know things as they
are in themselves. I focus here on the initial case Hegel uses to introduce
this extended argument strategy: we can have more knowledge of natural kinds
and laws than would be allowed by Kant’s bounds of experience.

Recent work on Hegel lacks consensus concerning the central
ambitions of his mature project in theoretical philosophy. It is at least
widely agreed that Hegel’s ambitions are closely tied to his rejection of
Kant’s famous claim about our epistemic limits: Kant denies that we can have
theoretical knowledge of things as they are in themselves; Hegel seeks, in
response, to show that our knowledge is not restricted or limited in Kant’s
sense. But there is a surprising divergence between two recently popular
approaches to this central Hegelian ambition.

A straightforward and popular approach is to read Hegel as
seeking to surpass Kant’s restriction: Hegel seeks to show that there
are real things, or real aspects of the world, which can be known only by
going beyond Kant’s limits; and to show that we ourselves have access to this
knowledge, or knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Of course, Kant
criticizes prior metaphysics for aspiring to knowledge of things in
themselves, so it is no surprise that some read Hegel as seeking to revive a
form metaphysical project pursued by Kant’s predecessors; for example, some
see Hegel as advocating a modified version of Spinoza’s
monism.1

There is in addition a very different alternative, also popular
recently, and sometimes referred to as a “non-metaphysical” or “post-Kantian”
interpretation of Hegel. The idea is that Hegel seeks to advance yet farther
Kant’s revolution against pre-critical metaphysics. To begin with, Kant
denies that we can have the kinds of knowledge to which pre-critical
metaphysics aspires, and Hegel agrees. But Hegel seeks to take Kant’s
denial yet farther: Hegel denies also all need to even conceive of Kant’s
things in themselves, leaving no contrast relative to which our own knowledge
could be said to be merely limited or restricted. That is, Hegel aims not to
surpass Kant’s restriction so much as to eliminate that
restriction from the
inside.2

But it is striking that Hegel’s Logic and
Encyclopedia sometimes suggest both the goal of eliminating from
within and the goal of surpassing Kant’s epistemic limits. For example,
at one point Hegel dismisses the very idea of things in themselves: “they are
as such nothing but truthless, empty abstractions.” And yet the very next
sentence adds that there is another sense in which Hegel’s Logic aims
to establish knowledge of things as they are in themselves: “What, however,
the thing in itself is in truth, what truly is in itself, of this logic is the
exposition” (WL 5:130/121). Of course, it can be difficult to understand how
anyone could coherently seek to eliminate the very idea of things in
themselves while also seeking to establish knowledge of real things in
themselves. But I argue that Hegel does have a way of joining these
seemingly divergent ambitions together, so that they provide the two basic and
equally important goals of his overall project in theoretical
philosophy.

I begin (section 1) by distinguishing two different Kantian
characterizations of the limits of our knowledge: One can, first, view our
epistemic limits from within, specifically by asking: What can we know?
We can have knowledge only within the “bounds of experience,” or within the
bounds delimited by our sensible intuition. But why conclude on this basis
that we are limited, or unable to know things as they are in themselves? While
Kant has more than one kind of answer, the answer of greatest importance for
Hegel is found in the argument of the “Transcendental Dialectic” from the
Critique of Pure Reason. Here Kant argues that the faculty of reason
guides our theoretical inquiry by providing a goal: knowledge of the
“unconditioned.” Further, such knowledge would be possible only for a higher,
even divine form of intellect—for “intellectual intuition” grasping real
objects immediately, and even grasping all of reality immediately. So the
faculty of reason guides us in a manner that compels us to conceive of the
bounds imposed by our sensible intuition in a second manner: from beyond their
reach, or as specifically restricting. What can’t we know? Objects
knowable only by divine intuition.

Hegel responds by trying to drive a wedge between Kant’s
different characterizations of our limits, opening up philosophical space
between the bounds of experience and divine intuition. He will argue
that we can have knowledge surpassing Kant’s bounds of experience, yet without
need of divine intuition grasping reality immediately and all at once. The
introductory sections of Hegel’s Encyclopedia focus on the specific
example of knowledge of natural laws and kinds. So I consider Kant’s view of
such knowledge, and Hegel’s initial case that we can have such knowledge
beyond the extent allowed by Kant’s bounds of experience (sections 3 and 4). I
then turn to the basic goals of the philosophical project which begins at this
point (section 5). Hegel will argue that knowledge of natural laws and kinds
and is just an initial example of the considerable explanatory knowledge we
can have beyond Kant’s bounds of experience, or knowledge (in this sense) of
things as they are in themselves. And Hegel will seek to show that our access
to such knowledge beyond Kant’s bounds, in this and further cases, leaves us
without any grounds for thinking that the guiding goal of our theoretical
inquiry is a kind of knowledge that is in principle unattainable. So Hegel
will conclude that there is no remaining need to even conceive of objects
knowable only by divine intuition, and that our own knowledge is subject to no
fundamental limitation or restriction. In other words, Hegel seeks to
establish knowledge of “things in themselves” (in the sense of explanatory
knowledge beyond Kant’s bounds) precisely in order to dismiss the very idea of
“things in themselves” (in the sense of objects knowable only by divine
intuition). Or, Hegel seeks to surpass Kant’s bounds of experience
precisely in order to eliminate from within the idea of a limitation
relative to divine intuition.

Finally, I aim here to avoid the sort of interpretive charity
that would begin with a favored contemporary view and then seek to find that
view in historical texts. I think that such an approach tends to obscure
differences between contemporary views and the views of historical figures, as
well as differences between different historical figures. My own position is
that the theoretical philosophies defended by Kant and Hegel are very
different, and that both have philosophical benefits as well as costs. I make
no attempt here at a comprehensive weighing of costs and benefits, or a final
judgment in favor of Kant or Hegel. And, of course, I cannot here explain and
defend all of the arguments by which Hegel seeks to achieve the ultimate
objectives of his theoretical philosophy. My concern is to show that Hegel is
surprisingly successful at integrating seemingly divergent ambitions into a
single, coherent, and philosophically interesting argument strategy, proposed
in the introductory sections of the Logic and Encyclopedia, and
directed against Kant’s case for the conclusion that our knowledge is
fundamentally limited or restricted.

I. Kant on Reason and the Limitation of Our Knowledge

I begin with a sketch of the argument for the limitation of our
knowledge found specifically in Kant’s account of the faculty of reason from
the “Transcendental Dialectic.” Kant here advances an account of the faculty
or capacity supposed to be responsible for our interest in explanatory
knowledge, and for providing the guiding goal for all our theoretical inquiry.
More specifically, we do not rest content with knowledge, provided by “the
understanding,” of what is the case in the empirical world. We seek to know
why such-and-such is the case; we seek to explain. In order to
account for this, the faculty of reason itself must be itself be characterized
by an “aim” or “end” (Zweck), or even an “interest”
(Interesse): insofar as we are rational, we
take an interest in underlying grounds or conditions of all kinds, or in
following a “regress from the conditioned to its condition” (A523/B521). And
not just to an arbitrary degree: we seek to follow the regress to completion,
or to achieve knowledge of the unconditioned. In short, “the proper
principle of reason in general … is to find the unconditioned for conditioned
cognitions of the understanding” (A307/B364).

But Kant holds, throughout the critical period, that we can
have knowledge only within the “bounds of experience.” Kant’s line of argument
is as follows: Analytic judgments cannot extend our knowledge but only clarify
our concepts (A7-8). Synthetic, knowledge-extending judgments about objects
require intuition: “all synthetic judgments of theoretical cognition
are possible only by the relating of a given concept to an intuition” (C
11:39). And we are dependent on sensibility for intuition. In Kant’s
terms, our “understanding” is merely “discursive,” which is to say that it
“can only think and must seek the intuition in the senses” (B135). So
we can extend our knowledge only in cases where intuitive content can be
provided by sensibility. Kant writes:

No concept can have its objective reality be secured, save
insofar as it can be presented in a corresponding intuition (which for us is
always sensory), so that beyond the bounds of sensibility and thus of possible
experience, there can be no cognition whatever, that is, no concepts of which
one is sure that they are not empty. (UE 8:188-9)

The limits of our experience and knowledge, then, are delimited
specifically by the bounds of sensibility. And so they are delimited by
the a priori forms of our sensibility: space and
time.3
We can have empirical synthetic knowledge of objects only where there is
possible empirical intuition, conditioned by those forms. And we can have a
priori knowledge only where intuitive content is provided by a
priori intuitions of space and time themselves. For example, the a
priori intuition of space is supposed to make possible synthetic knowledge
of necessary and universal truths of geometry. Synthetic priori
knowledge of the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience is
similar. For example, the “Second Analogy” establishes that “all alterations
occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect”
(B232). This result is not supposed to be proven “dogmatically, i.e. from
concepts”; it is synthetic in virtue of its connection to time: the
analogies articulate “a priori conditions of the thoroughgoing and
necessary time-determination”
(A216-7/B263-4).4

These bounds of experience prevent knowledge of anything truly
unconditioned. First, consider the possibility that there really exists an
absolutely unconditioned first condition on which a whole series of conditions
depends. This first condition could not be an event in time, as it would then
have to be conditioned by a prior cause; and it could not be an object in
space, as it would then have to be conditioned by smaller
parts.5
There is an alterative way to conceive of the unconditioned: an infinite
series without any first condition might still be such that the totality
of the series grounds or conditions all of the members, so that “their
whole is absolutely unconditioned” (A417/B445). But such a totality cannot be
anything in space and time without, again, being merely conditioned. Further,
corresponding intuitive content cannot be generated in this case: there can be
no completion of a stepwise “successive synthesis” of the “manifold of
sensible intuition” in space and time for knowledge of an infinite
totality.6
In sum, then, the forms of our sensible intuition prevent all possibility of
knowledge of the unconditioned: “in sensibility, i.e. in space and time, every
condition to which we can attain in the exposition of given appearances is in
turn conditioned” (A508/B536). And in demanding that we seek knowledge of “the
unconditioned,” the faculty of reason is pointing or aiming us specifically
“beyond the boundaries of experience” (Bxx).

We can understand in these terms a central strategy in Kant’s
attacks on previous forms of metaphysics. For example, Leibnizian rationalists
wish to draw conclusions about an absolutely inner nature of things, and Kant
anticipates their complaint that he allows “no insight” here. Kant’s response
is that asserting knowledge of a real and absolutely inner nature of things,
as opposed to claims merely clarifying the implications of our concepts, would
require intuition, but not an intuition possible for our sensibility:

They would have us be able to cognize things, thus intuit them,
even without senses, consequently they would have it that we have a faculty of
cognition entirely distinct from the human not merely in degree but even in
intuition and kind.

Such an intellect could be possessed “not by humans but beings
that we cannot even say are possible, let alone how they are constituted”
(A277-8/B333-4). So Kant will argue that the bounds of experience, delimited
by our sensible intuition and its forms, prevent the legitimate assertion of
such metaphysical claims.

As this last citation makes clear, Kant does claim that we can
conceive of a higher form of cognition or intellect different in kind, at
least to some degree, by contrasting our own. Such cognition would require a
non-sensible form of intuition, or “intellectual intuition”—which would bypass
the mediating conditions of our sensible intuition, providing immediate
access to
reality.7
If there is a non-spatio-temporal first condition on which a series of
conditions depends, then knowledge of it would be possible for an intellect
bypassing the mediating conditions of our sensibility, space and time.
And this first kind of immediacy would bring along another sense of immediacy:
intellectual intuition could grasp together immediately even an
infinite totality of conditions, without having to work stepwise through
successive synthesis of a manifold of intuition. So, as Kant emphasizes in the
Critique of the Power of Judgment (KU), if there is an absolutely
unconditioned totality, then a higher form of “intuitive understanding” could
have knowledge of
it.8
When I refer here to “divine” intuition, I am referring to the two kinds of
immediacy which would eliminate the barriers blocking our knowledge of the
unconditioned: intellectual intuition “would grasp and present the object
immediately and all at once (unmittelbar und auf
einmal)” (TP 8:389). (I will not consider here Kant’s further claim
that such an intellect would also have to be divine in the sense that its own
thoughts would immediately bring their objects into
being.9)

Despite our inability to know anything unconditioned, Kant
argues that ideas of the unconditioned play a necessary and legitimate
role in all our theoretical inquiry. In Kant’s terms, reason’s demand that we
seek the unconditioned is necessary and legitimate as a “regulative principle”
guiding our inquiry, but not as a “constitutive principle” which would
extend our knowledge to the unconditioned, or “beyond all possible experience”
(A509/B537). In the appendix to the “Transcendental Dialectic,” Kant applies
the point to natural scientific inquiry. Here ideas of the unconditioned are
supposed to “have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use,
namely that of directing the understanding to a certain goal” (A644/B672).

Finally, this account of reason plays a crucial role supporting
Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kant’s canonical formulations of this view
take the form of a claim about all objects of our knowledge, or “everything
intuited in space and time, hence all objects of an experience possible for
us”: these are “appearances” as opposed to things as they are in
themselves.10
We do not need to resolve here the many controversies concerning this
doctrine, but only to note the feature emphasized by Ameriks: transcendental
idealism and Kant’s arguments for it turn on specific reference to our
sensible intuition and to its specific forms, space and
time.11
Kant sometimes emphasizes this by contrasting divine intuition, for example:
“in the Critique of Pure Reason we had to have in mind another possible
intuition if we were to hold our own to be a special kind, namely one that is
valid of objects merely as appearances” (KU 5:406). But what are Kant’s
reasons for his conclusion? In particular, we are supposed to be unable to
know that there really is divine intuition, or things knowable only thereby;
so why should we conclude that our own sensible intuition is limiting,
or that it prevents knowledge of things as they are in themselves?

The Critique of Pure Reason is supposed to provide two
basic kinds of arguments for transcendental idealism (Bxviii-xxii and
A506/B534). The first kind aims to establish that only transcendental idealism
can explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge
(Bxviii-xix). But there is also a second kind of argument, based on the
account of reason. The basic idea is easy to appreciate: we must conclude that
our own sensible intuition and its forms are limiting insofar as they
preclude our reaching the guiding goal that we ourselves seek in all
theoretical inquiry. Kant sketches the argument in this way:

That which necessarily drives us to go beyond the boundaries of
experience and all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason
necessarily and with every right demands in things themselves for everything
that is conditioned.

True, we cannot know that there really is anything
unconditioned. But precisely because we must conceive and cannot know the
unconditioned, we must conceive of it as “present in things insofar as we are
not acquainted with them, as things in themselves.” Otherwise, “the
unconditioned cannot be thought at all without contradiction” (Bxx).
Otherwise, that is, tensions between the idea of the unconditioned and the
constraints imposed by our form of cognition will drive us to the
contradictions discussed in the first two “Antinomies”. So we must distinguish
the objects of our knowledge from things as they are in themselves, and
conclude that our knowledge is limited or restricted.

II. The Goal of Eliminating One Kantian Limit by Surpassing Another

My own view is that Kant’s account of the faculty of reason,
and the conclusions it is supposed to support, have real philosophical
advantages that would be worth attention in their own right. But my aim here
is not to further interpret or defend this material in Kant; it is to
understand Hegel’s response.

One simple and straightforward way of rejecting Kant’s limits
would be to claim to surpass all of the limits he sets. For example, one might
assert knowledge that there is some kind of highest being knowable only by
grasping reality immediately and all at once. This may be the best way to
understand Hegel’s own earliest philosophical publications, dating from the
short period of his collaboration with Schelling in Jena; Longuenesse, for
example, reads Hegel’s 1802 article “Faith and Knowledge” as claiming that
“God’s knowledge is accessible to finite consciousness” (2000, 263). But
Hegel’s earliest publications, his break with Schelling, and his early
development are all topics beyond my scope here. I limit my focus here to the
philosophical project of Hegel’s later writings, especially as this project is
introduced and defended in the early sections of the Logic (1812-16)
and Encyclopedia (1816-30; I refer here to the 1830 edition). Here
Hegel places tremendous stress on a very general criticism of claims
about highest beings (or somehow most fundamental aspect of reality) supposed
to be knowable only by divine intuition grasping reality immediately and all
at
once.12

For example, already the “Preface” of the Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807) complains about “a view which is in our time as prevalent as
it is pretentious”: the view that “the true exists only in what, or better
as what, is sometimes called intuition, sometimes immediate knowledge
of the absolute, religion, or being” (PG 3:15/4). The beginning of the
Encyclopedia includes a section meant to characterize the philosophical
views most popular among Hegel’s own contemporaries; here Hegel claims that
his contemporaries generally appeal to one or another form of “immediate
knowledge” (§61-§78). Hegel takes Jacobi as paradigmatic, but he casts a wide
net (§63An). Elsewhere he includes others: for example, Schelling, “like
Jacobi, makes his principle immediate knowledge—the intelligent intuition”
(VGP 20:427/3:519). Hegel’s goal here is to bring out a similarity among views
that will also differ in other respects. Perhaps there are also other respects
in which Hegel himself is influenced by some of these views. But Hegel argues
that such views share one specific feature which is itself philosophically
unacceptable: Any appeal to “immediate knowledge” must claim neither to admit
nor to require the mediation of a justification—whether a
justification by empirical experience, by philosophical argument, or anything
else. To appeal to immediate knowledge, then, is to hold that all required
justification is contained with the act of knowing itself. But this can only
by “subjective knowing,” so that “the factum of consciousness … has
been made into the criterion of truth” (§71). And by this standard any
“superstition or idolatry” might equally be “proclaimed as truth” (§72). If we
were willing to allow that, then there would be no reason to bother
with philosophy. Philosophy, by contrast, must “not tolerate any mere
assurances or imagining” (§77). Hegel elsewhere deploys the same basic
argument against Schelling: “One wants, if one philosophizes, to have proven
that it is so”; but with Schelling’s appeal to intellectual intuition, “the
proving of anything, the making it comprehensible, is thus
abandoned.”13

While there are complex questions concerning the accuracy of
Hegel’s interpretations of his contemporaries, and perhaps rejoinders to his
attack, Hegel’s line of argument certainly clarifies his own philosophical
goals. In short, Hegel’s complaint draws on a familiar Kantian commitment:
“our age is the genuine age of criticism,” Kant says, “to which everything
must submit” (Axi). Hegel’s complaint is that appeals to “immediate knowledge”
involve a refusal to submit to criticism. With Jacobi, for example, “that
immediacy is grasped as absolute, manifests a lack of all criticism,
all logic”; and Hegel says that his contemporaries generally move “beyond the
Kantian philosophy” not by going “forward” but rather by going “backward” to
the “procedure of the older metaphysics, an uncritical thinking on and
on.”14

Of course, Hegel himself is no orthodox Kantian: Hegel will
argue, against Kant, that our knowledge is not fundamentally limited or
restricted. But we must understand this desired conclusion here in manner
consistent with Hegel’s claim to carry the Kantian philosophy farther
“forward.” More specifically, Kant denies the possibility of knowledge of
objects of divine intuition; Hegel seeks to push this critical denial yet
farther, turning it against Kant himself: Hegel will argue that we have no
need or legitimate reason even to conceive of objects knowable only by divine
intuition, leaving no legitimate sense in which our own knowledge would be
fundamentally limited or restricted by comparison.

Before turning to Hegel’s argument for this desired conclusion,
consider further the meaning of the conclusion itself. To begin with, it makes
sense for Hegel to call Kant’s idealism as a form of “dualism,” at least in
this specific and limited sense: whatever else we say about it, Kant says that
his idealism rests on a distinction between two forms of intellect supposed
to be utterly different in
kind.15
To be sure, Kant does not assert knowledge of the reality of a divine
intuition. Rather, the conception of the unconditioned provides a guiding goal
which we are required to always seek in all theoretical inquiry, and which
allows continuous scientific progress while remaining in principle
unreachable. So the conception of something that would be knowable only by
divine intuition plays the role, in Hegel’s terms, of “the ought and
the infinite progress” in Kant’s “dualism” (WL 5:181/163). But Hegel is
an anti-dualist, in the sense that he seeks to do away entirely with even the
conception of a divine intuition and of objects knowable only thereby—to show
that there is no legitimate reason we need conceive of these ideas, or accord
them philosophical importance.

Note that this particular form of anti-dualism pits Hegel
against even some forms of monism. Consider this monist proposal: The
totality of everything in this world is not truly a whole composed of smaller
parts in space, or something merely conditioned by its parts; if we could
break beyond our ordinary ways of knowing things in space and instead grasp
immediately together the whole of everything, we would find that the
totality provides an absolutely unified and unconditioned ground for all
reality.16
Hegel must and does reject such forms of monism. In Kant’s terms, “the
idea of absolute totality” is “valid only as a condition of things in
themselves” (A506/B534). And Hegel treats the idea of an absolutely
unconditioned and unified totality as the idea of a “thing in itself” in the
specific sense that it is the idea of something knowable only by divine
intuition grasping reality immediately and all at once. In Hegel’s terms, “the
thing in itself is the same as that absolute of which we know nothing except
that in it all is one.” And Hegel, first of all, follows Kant in denying the
possibility of knowledge of such things in themselves. What’s more, Hegel
seeks to argue for the further conclusion that there is no legitimate reason
even to take such ideas seriously: “things in themselves” in this sense are
“as such nothing but truthless, empty abstractions” (WL 5:130/121).

Hegel states this goal in more general terms in the
introductory sections of the Logic. The idea of a “thing in itself,” at
least in the sense of any object supposed to be available only to divine
intuition, is a “sheer beyond of thought” (WL 5:37/45): the content for this
idea is provided by a contrast with or abstraction from the objects we
ourselves can think, cognize, and know. Hegel seeks to show that there is no
legitimate philosophical role to be played by that idea. He sides with those
who have “recognized the nothingness of the spectral thing in itself left over
from the Kantian philosophy … and intended to destroy it completely”; Hegel
wants a new approach that can finally bring this destruction “to a successful
conclusion” (WL 5:41/47). Alternatively, he aims to show that “these things
which are supposed to stand beyond us … are themselves figments of thought …
the so-called thing in itself of empty abstraction” (WL 5:26/36).

But it is one thing to grasp Hegel’s goal here, and it is
another to understand the arguments by means of which he hopes to achieve that
goal. To say that Kant’s view is in one sense a form of “dualism” is not to
demonstrate that there is anything wrong with it. Furthermore, from the claim
that we can know nothing about the objects of divine intuition it does not
follow that ideas of such objects must be empty, meaningless, empty
abstractions, illegitimate, idle, or of no importance. It is after all part of
Kant’s own point to insist on our lack of knowledge, while arguing that we
have other reasons for taking seriously such ideas—and so other reasons for
distinguishing objects of our knowledge from things as they are in themselves.
If Hegel is to conclude that our knowledge is not fundamentally limited or
restricted, then he must meet Kant’s argument with philosophical arguments of
his own.

Hegel’s argument strategy will turn on his attempts to show
that we can have knowledge exceeding Kant’s bounds of experience, yet without
need divine intuition grasping reality immediately and all at once. That is,
Hegel will try to show that Kant’s distinction between our own cognition and
divine cognition is a false dichotomy. In Hegel’s terms, “the antithesis
between an independent immediacy of the content or of knowing, and, on the
other side, an equally independent mediation that is irreconcilable with it,
must be put aside” (§78). Hegel recognizes that Kant affirms “the
objective validity of our empirical judgments” (A202/B247); so one cannot go
beyond Kant’s limits merely by reaffirming this objective
validity.17
But Hegel argues that Kant’s specific commitment concerning the bounds of
experience would block access to a great deal of explanatory knowledge.
For example, Hegel will ultimately emphasize his case, against Kant, that we
can have explanatory knowledge of genuinely teleological phenomena in the case
of living
beings.18
But Hegel introduces and explains his project in the Encyclopedia
mainly by means of the initial example of explanatory knowledge of natural
laws and kinds. So I will focus here, first, on why Kant’s bounds require him
to deny the possibility of knowledge of natural kinds and laws, except the
laws governing all matter. And I will focus on Hegel’s initial reasons
for responding with linked metaphysical and epistemological claims: The
metaphysical claim is that there are more laws than just the most general laws
governing all matter—there are determinate laws governing specifically
distinct natural kinds. And the epistemological claim is that we can have
knowledge of these laws and kinds, without need of divine intuition grasping
reality all at once. Hegel will later seek to complete and extend his account
of explanatory knowledge beyond Kant’s bounds, and of the objects of this
knowledge (such as natural laws and kinds). And he will ultimately argue that
we have access to so much explanatory knowledge that there is no remaining
need to conceive of the goal of theoretical inquiry as a kind of knowledge
that would be accessible only to divine intuition—and no need to conclude that
our own knowledge is, by comparison, limited or restricted, leaving us without
knowledge of things as they are in themselves.

III. Kant on Knowledge of Natural Laws and Kinds

Why does Kant’s commitment concerning the “bounds of
experience” restrict the possibility of knowledge of natural kinds and laws?
On the face of it, one might have thought that natural science discovers such
laws, and that all natural scientific knowledge is meant to fall within Kant’s
“bounds of experience.” But Kant’s bounds are not delimited by ad hoc
lists of sorts of knowledge meant to be included and excluded. Rather, Kant
commits himself to a general principle: synthetic knowledge requires not only
concepts but also “corresponding intuition (which for us is always sensory)”
(UE 8:188-9). This is supposed to allow knowledge of unperceived
objects which are “connected with our perceptions in a possible experience”
according to the a priori laws governing all experience. It is even
meant to allow knowledge of objects whose perception “is impossible for us
given the constitution of our organs”—Kant mentions “magnetic matter” here—so
long as these are objects of “possible experience in general,” or so long as
corresponding sensible intuition would be possible given “finer” sense organs
(A225/B273).

But when it comes to natural laws, Kant holds that these must
be universal and
necessary.19
And for a claim about how absolutelyall things of a given kind
necessarily behave, there can be no corresponding empirical
intuition from sensibility. Not even from a sensibility superior to ours in
degree, so long as it is like ours in kind. So Kant’s commitment concerning
the bounds of experience, as Michael Friedman has emphasized, rules out the
possibility of strictly or purely empirical knowledge of natural laws
governing natural kinds; Kant’s holds that “empirically one can discover
rules, but not laws … for to the latter belongs necessity, and hence that they
are cognized a
priori.”20

Of course, Kant famously defends the possibility of
synthetic a priori knowledge of necessity. But synthetic knowledge
requires intuition. And synthetic knowledge of necessity requires a
priori intuition. Given Kant’s bounds, this can only be the a
priori intuitions of space and time, or the pure forms of our sensible
intuition. As noted above, the connection to time in particular is supposed to
make possible knowledge of a priori principles of time-determination,
including of the law of causality: “all alterations occur in accordance with
the law of the connection of cause and effect” (B232). But while it is a
matter of debate whether Kant aims to prove in the “Second Analogy” that there
must be determinate causal laws governing specific kinds of things, that
argument certainly does not purport to establish knowledge of any particular
laws.21
The law of causality and all principles of the understanding are a
priori laws of “nature in general” as opposed to “particular laws” (B165).

Kant does hold that there must be a close connection between
the general principles of the understanding and particular natural laws:
“without exception all laws of nature stand under higher principles of the
understanding, as they only apply the latter to particular cases of
appearance” (A159/B198). And Kant gives an account of how this connection or
application works in the 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
(MAN). The topic here is not supposed to be general transcendental inquiry
“without any relation to any determinate object of experience”; MAN pursues
rather inquiry into “a particular nature of this or that kind of thing.” More
specifically, Kant seeks to establish knowledge of the necessary laws
governing all material objects. He does so by applying the a
priori principles of the understanding to the empirical concept of
matter. But it is crucial that Kant’s commitment concerning the bounds
of experience still imposes its constraints here. Synthetic knowledge of
necessity still requires a priori intuition: “it is still required that
the intuition corresponding to the concept be given a priori”
(MAN 4:469-470). Kant holds that such knowledge is possible in the case of
matter specifically because there is a special connection between the
empirical concept of matter and a priori intuition. He begins to make
this case by claiming that everything showing up in outer sense (whose form is
space) must be corporeal (4:470), and more specifically must be matter in
motion
(4:476).22

MAN is more pessimistic about chemistry, specifically because
of the apparent lack of connection to a priori intuition: “chemistry
can become nothing more than a systematic art or experimental doctrine, but
never science proper; for the principles of chemistry are merely empirical and
admit of no presentation a priori in
intuition.”23
But the important point here goes beyond the specific example of chemistry.
Chemistry is a case in which we naturally expect laws governing not a
single basic kind like matter, but rather relations between
specifically distinct natural kinds, such as water as
specifically distinct from other chemical kinds. There are no prospects for
arguing that the concept water applies to everything that shows up in
outer sense, thus grounding a correspondence to a priori intuition. So
Kant must and does conclude that, if there are specifically distinct
natural kinds of this sort, then we have no possibility whatsoever of ever
coming to know their necessary natural laws. We might acquire knowledge of the
laws of chemistry, but only if it can become more like physics—only if the
distinct chemical kinds can be reduced to something like a single kind of
matter in motion, so that for the “chemical actions of matters on one another”
it would be possible that “their motions and all the consequences thereof can
be made intuitive and presented a priori in space” (MAN
4:470-1).24

The crucial general point here is that Kant allows no
possibility of gaining knowledge of natural laws governing specifically
distinct kinds. For example, in the KU:

Specifically distinct natures, besides what they have in common
as belonging to nature in general, can still be causes in infinitely many
ways; and each of these ways must … have its rule, which is a law, and hence
brings necessity with it, although given the constitution and the limits of
our faculties of cognition we have no insight at all into this necessity (KU
5:183)25

Now one issue raised by this passage is this: Does Kant claim
that there are real but unknowable law-governed and specifically
distinct natural kinds? Or that we indispensably, usefully, and rationally
believe there to be such laws and kinds, but cannot know that there are? Or
does Kant take our inability to have scientific knowledge of such kinds as
pure elements to specifically “preclude a scientific realist construal of
those entities” (Okruhlik 1986, 313)? I would favor the intermediate answer,
but I cannot resolve that issue here. For my purposes the crucial point is the
denial of knowledge maintained from the first to the third
Critique: (i) Kant recognizes that there are cases, as in chemistry,
where we naturally expect there to be necessary laws governing specifically
distinct kinds; and (ii) Kant’s bounds of experience require him to deny,
and he does deny, the possibility of our ever gaining theoretical knowledge of
natural laws governing specifically distinct kinds.

To be sure, Kant does argue in the appendix to the
“Transcendental Dialectic” that we necessarily and legitimately pursue
knowledge of absolutely basic and pure underlying chemical elements, and
the laws governing their interactions. This pursuit requires guidance by
concepts of pure elements, which “as far as their complete purity is
concerned, have their origin only in reason” (A646/B674). Here reason’s goal
of the unconditioned, applied to the specific challenges of explaining the
complexity and diversity of nature, directs us to seek a fundamental
underlying system of natural forces, laws, and kinds—a “systematic unity of
nature” which would explain everything natural. We cannot reach this goal,
because in pointing us toward the unconditioned, reason aims us toward a point
that would fall “entirely outside the bounds of possible experience”
(A644/B672). We can progress “asymptotically” (A663/B691) by simplifying the
system of forces, laws and kinds we recognize as basic, while accounting in
these terms for ever more phenomena—by bringing “systematic unity into
cognition” (A650/B678).

But note that Kant does not here defend knowledge of
necessary and universal natural laws governing relations between pure chemical
elements, or any other specifically distinct natural kinds. He argues that we
can approximate knowledge, or more precisely that we can have knowledge
of “empirical rules” which approximate the status of necessary natural
laws. For example, “this use of reason is only regulative, bringing unity into
particular cognitions as far as possible and thereby approximating the rule
to universality” (A647/B675; my emphasis). The third Critique
provides a new approach to these issues, focused on the idea of “reflective
judgment,” but the point about approximation remains. Kant here refers to the
“order of nature in its particular rules, which can only be empirically known
and which are, as regards the understanding, contingent.” True, reflective
judgment is supposed to provide the understanding with rational warrant
allowing these particular rules to “be thought by it as laws (i.e. as
necessary).” Still, with respect to such laws, “it does not and can never
cognize their necessity” (KU 5:184-5). So from the first to the third
Critique Kant denies the possibility of our having knowledge of
particular, necessary and universal laws governing specifically distinct
kinds.26
Kant’s commitment throughout concerning the bounds of experience allows
scientific knowledge of necessary natural laws only in those cases
where we can reduce the basic concepts of natural kinds to a concept which can
be shown to correspond to a priori intuition, as is supposed to be
shown with the concept of matter in
MAN.27

Granted, some recent readers argue that Kant, during the
critical period, himself asserts knowledge of nature which oversteps his own
official commitments concerning our limits, anticipating his own late
“post-critical” notes for an unfinished project (the Opus
postumum).28
I do not advocate this approach. But it is worth noting that, if such a
reading were correct, then defending Hegel would be that much easier: one
could then find support in Kant’s own critical works for Hegel’s challenge.
Yet I seek to show that we can appreciate the philosophical appeal of Hegel’s
own argument against Kant’s official commitments concerning the limitation of
our knowledge and transcendental idealism, without having to draw on such
controversial claims about Kant himself contradicting those commitments.

Finally, note that it is not regrettable but desirable, given
Kant’s further goals, to reach the conclusion that there are cases in which
our scientific inquiry can find no stopping points in the pursuit of knowledge
of laws and kinds, but can find only continual progress toward a goal that is
in principle unreachable. For this conclusion contributes to the argument for
transcendental idealism sketched above: Kant aims to show that theoretical
inquiry seeks knowledge which is in principle inaccessible for us, and he
seeks to argue on these grounds that conceiving of our own theoretical goals
requires distinguishing the objects of our knowledge from things as they are
in themselves.

IV. Hegel on Knowledge of Natural Laws and Kinds

Hegel elsewhere dismisses Kant’s account of the knowability of
the laws governing matter. Hegel argues that Kant’s a priori intuitions
are themselves too indeterminate to ground knowledge of any determinate
natural laws and kinds. In effect, Hegel asks: Is Kant’s concept of matter
just the concept of anything that could possibly be experienced in space? If
so, then the laws Kant establishes will not be determinate or particular laws
of nature but rather general or formal a priori laws of “nature in
general,” like the “principles of the understanding” established in the first
Critique. If not, then we will have no a priori intuition
corresponding directly to the empirical concept of matter, making knowledge of
the necessary laws of all matter impossible within Kant’s bounds
of experience. In Hegel’s terms, the forces whose laws Kant claims to
establish “are either ideal, in which case they are not forces, or else they
are
transcendent.”29

So how does Hegel argue, in the introductory sections of
the Encyclopedia, that we can gain knowledge of natural laws and kinds,
including specifically distinct kinds? The key is the idea that appeal to laws
of nature can explain natural phenomena specifically insofar as the
laws really determine or govern natural
phenomena.30
And we can gain knowledge by thinking about what we observe, and drawing
inferences about the natural laws and kinds which explain our observations. In
Hegel’s terms, “thinking things over leads to what is universal in
them” (§24An). Lecture notes attached to a nearby paragraph add: “in thinking
about things, we always seek what is fixed, persisting and inwardly
determined, and what governs the particular” (§21Zu; my emphasis). What
does govern the particular? Universal laws and kinds:

The empirical sciences do not stop at the perception of single
instances of appearance; but through thinking they have prepared the material
for philosophy by finding universal determinations, kinds, and laws (§12An).

Naturally, it can be objected that the kind of “thought” which
infers from experience to governing laws and kinds would be too uncertain to
yield knowledge. The introductory sections of the Encyclopedia argue
that such objections depend on two unconvincing commitments, both of which
Hegel associates with empiricism. The first empiricist commitment is this:
Sense perception sets the standard for all knowledge by providing immediacy
and so certainty. If so, then one might argue that any inferences we draw
beyond perception, including inferences about laws and kinds, would lack
immediacy and so certainty, and would for this reason fall short of knowledge.
But Hegel complains that empiricists simply assume the immediacy and certainty
of sense experience. For example, “in Hume’s skepticism, the truth of
the empirical, the truth of feeling and intuition is taken as basic; and on
that basis, he attacks all universal determinations and laws” (§39An).
Further, in rejecting the idea that we have any kind of “immediate knowledge,”
Hegel is committed to holding that all our knowledge, even of the objects of
perception, is
mediated.31
If so, then this line of thought provides at least initial support for Hegel’s
alternative position: if we wish to avoid the counter-intuitive conclusion
that we have no knowledge of anything at all, then we must reject the
empiricist arguments that a lack of immediacy precludes knowledge of
“universal determinations and
laws.”32

It is worth considering again Kant’s position on natural laws
and kinds in this connection. Kant claims that there is a boundary at which
our knowledge ends; given this boundary, he can defend only the possibility of
approximate knowledge of natural laws governing specifically distinct
kinds. One might seek to defend Kant’s view by arguing as follows: knowledge
of laws and kinds is supposed to be approximate in the sense that it is
fallible and revisable (e.g. Kitcher 1986, 230); and this is just what we
should expect, insofar such knowledge certainly does seem to be
fallible and revisable. But this is not itself sufficient defense. To defend
Kant’s claim about the boundary in these terms would require also an
argument that matters are different on the other side of the boundary—an
argument that we have knowledge within the bounds of experience which
is not fallible and revisable in any similar sense, including knowledge
of perceived objects and even knowledge of the laws governing all matter.
Otherwise we would have to either deny knowledge on both sides of Kant’s
boundary, or else admit knowledge on both sides. Indeed, Hegel’s view is
simply that there are no sharp lines dividing our insight into the objects of
perception from our insight into natural laws and kinds—no line at which there
is a sharp change in mediation, fallibility, revisibility, etc., so no sharp
line at which knowledge might be said to end. Of course, this denial of sharp
lines stems again from Hegel’s anti-dualist rejection of the idea that we have
any immediate knowledge at all.

Hegel also singles out a metaphysical commitment which
he associates with empiricism. The commitment is this: Reality consists only
of things which are entangled in no necessary connections, such as
“alterations that follow one after the other” and “objects that lie
side by side” (§39). If so, then one might argue as follows: A law of
nature cannot be anything like a necessary connection; a law of nature must be
rather an exceptionless or universal regularity in the arrangement of
things. So insofar as the arrangement of disconnected things determines which
regularities hold universally, this will determine what the laws of
nature are; natural laws will not govern or determine what
happens, they will rather describe or
summarize.33
If so, then we cannot gain knowledge of laws by drawing inferences about what
governs or determines the things we observe. One might then further argue
that, in trying to discover laws of nature we can only venture uncertain
estimates, from our limited observations, about what regularities might turn
out to be universal; we could achieve knowledge of the laws of nature
only if we could somehow experience everything—perhaps with divine intuition
grasping immediately and all at once the whole of reality.

Hegel rejects the guiding metaphysical commitment here. He
allows that “empirical observation … does not provide any necessary
connection” (§39). But while empiricists may like the metaphysical view
that reality entirely lacks necessary connections, their own epistemological
constraints should prevent them from justifying it: if we cannot draw further
inferences from perception to anything else, then we cannot draw inferences
from the fact that we do not perceive necessary connection to any particular
conception of “universal notions, principles, and laws”—let alone to a view
about the nature of all reality. So Hegel complains about any “empiricism”
holding that “these universal determinations … are not supposed to have any
more significance and validity on their own account than that which is taken
from perception” (§38An). And Hegel argues that empiricism here puts forward a
general metaphysics, but “without knowing that it thereby itself contains a
metaphysics” (§38An)—and so without providing the sort of support such a view
would require.

Note that if Hegel is right that these empiricist commitments
are without convincing support, then neither can provide any reason to reject
our intuitions about the nature and knowability of natural laws and kinds. And
those intuitions can provide at least initial support for Hegel’s view. In
particular, say one accepts the intuition that appeal to natural laws can
explain particular natural phenomena specifically insofar as those laws
truly govern or determine the particular phenomena (rather than
merely describing or summarizing regularities). Similarly, say one accepts the
intuition that appeal to natural laws explain particular natural phenomena by
grouping them into determinate kinds governed by the uniform laws—rather than
being restricted to governing each individual case differently, or being
restricted to governing all of nature as a single maximally abstract kind.
Such intuitions provide at least initial reason for thinking that there really
are natural laws and specifically distinct natural kinds. In more Hegelian
terms, they provide initial support for the reality of something—laws and
kinds—that does not show up in perception, but is accessible to further
“thought” about our observations. Hegel says:

Inasmuch as it is said that … mind and nature have universal
laws to which their life and changes conform, then it is conceded that the
determinations of thought equally have objective value and existence. (WL
5:45/51)

Similarly, if one accepts the intuition that we ourselves can
explain at least some natural phenomena by appealing to natural laws, then
this will provide initial reason to think that we have at least some knowledge
of natural laws and kinds. And if the metaphysical view that reality contains
no necessary connections is unsupported and rules out the possibility of such
knowledge, then why not take this as at least initial reason to reject that
metaphysical
view?34

Hegel also continues from his discussion of empiricism, in the
opening sections of the Encyclopedia, to treat Kant’s critical
philosophy as a subvariety of one general “position of thought with respect to
objectivity.” He interprets Kant’s claims about the “bounds of experience,”
then, as indebted to broadly empiricist
commitments.35
But it is important that Kant has a distinctive argument of his own in support
of his claims about the bounds of experience: Our cognition is finite, in the
sense that we lack divine or intellectual intuition which grasps reality
immediately and all at once; therefore we must be limited to the knowledge
possible for a “discursive” understanding—or an understanding dependent for
all intuition on sensibility, and so restricted by the limits of what can be
presented in sensible
intuition.36
If this argument is successful, then it will provide reason to accept any
further consequences, even if the consequences about laws and kinds could be
shown to be counter-intuitive. But the suppressed premise is any such argument
is that the distinction between the two kinds of intellect is exhaustive, so
that our lack of one type establishes that we are limited to the other. And
Hegel’s initial example of knowledge of natural laws and kinds suggests that
Kant’s basic distinction rather a false dichotomy. For such knowledge exceeds
what Kant allows as possible for a discursive understanding dependent on
sensible intuition, and yet it does not require a divine grasp of reality
immediately and all at once. Perhaps if there were independent reason to
think that laws only describe or summarize universal regularities, then there
would also be reason to think that knowledge of laws would require
experiencing everything, or divine intuition grasping all of nature
immediately and all at once, so as to gain knowledge of which regularities do
hold universally. But Hegel rejects this conception of natural laws. And Hegel
provides an initial account on which our knowledge of natural laws and kinds
is not immediate, but specifically requires the “mediation” (§22) of
experience and further thinking about it—so much mediation that
empiricists are bound to complain. Hegel’s account of our knowledge of natural
laws and kinds does not require him to deny that our knowledge is always
mediated in some way. It requires him to deny Kant’s claim that our knowledge
is always mediated in one and the same specific sense: that it is always
mediated or conditioned by the limits of what can be presented in sensible
intuition, and so mediated specifically by the forms of space and time.

In sum, the opening sections of the Encyclopedia
provide—in response to the most obvious reasons for doubt, and to Kant’s
reasons for doubt—initial support for the claims that there are natural laws
governing determinate natural kinds, and that we can have knowledge of these
(with no special restriction to only a maximally abstract or general kind like
matter).

V. The Ambitions of Hegel’s Theoretical Philosophy

It is now possible to understand the general sense in which
Hegel seeks to show that we can have knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. Hegel argues from the beginning that we can have knowledge beyond
the bounds of experience; insofar as there are objects of such knowledge,
there are objects beyond Kant’s bounds. More specifically, there are a variety
of “universal determinations,” of which natural laws and kinds are initial
cases. For example, perhaps gold and mercury are natural kinds
whose interaction is governed by a natural law. If so, then to come to know
that these are the kinds of substances we observe, and to know the law
governing their reaction, is to progress from the sensible features of things
to knowledge of their more fundamental features—to knowledge of those features
which explain what happens when these substances come into contact. Kant can
allow that we approximate such insight; perhaps we know well enough from
experience what we can likely expect when this stuff touches that stuff. But
Kant must deny us knowledge that gold and mercury really are the
natural kinds governed by the natural law which truly necessitates or
determines what happens here. He must deny that we can have here the sort of
knowledge we are supposed to have of the sensible features of the objects of
experience. Insofar as such explanatory knowledge would be knowledge of a law
governing of specifically distinct kinds, it would be knowledge surpassing
Kant’s bounds of experience. It would be, in this sense, knowledge of things
as they are in themselves. Alternatively, insofar as this knowledge explains,
or answers why-questions, it is knowledge of interest to reason. In
Hegel’s terms, then, he seeks to show that we can have knowledge of “the thing
in itself, to use the Kantian expression—or rather the reasonable” (WL
5:60-1/63-4).

Hegel most commonly expresses this point by means of his
surprising use of the term “concept” (Begriff). Adequate explanation of
that term would require a separate study. But we can at least note that Hegel
uses that term to refer to the sorts of “universal determinations” we have
been discussing, including especially the general natural kinds governed by
universal natural laws. For example, in discussing chemistry Hegel uses the
term “concept” to refer to chemical kinds, or “the universal essence, the real
kind (Gattung) of the particular object” (WL 6:430/728). Such
“universal determinations” or “concepts” are not supposed to be separate
entities inhabiting a separate ontological realm of universals. They are
rather “immanent”:

the nature, the peculiar essence, that which is genuinely
permanent and substantial in the complexity and contingency of appearance and
fleeting manifestation, is the concept (Begriff) of the thing, the
immanent universal (WL 5:26/36).

So Hegel’s Begriffe, including initially natural kinds
governed by universal laws, are not mind-dependent in the sense we would
expect given the term “concept”: the reality and the real effective impact of
laws governing natural kinds does not depend on their being represented by us.
They are not mind-dependent, but they are accessible only to thought:
universal determinations are not present as such in experience; we must
actively think further about experience in order to separate out and grasp the
universal aspects, or the Begriffe, as
such.37

Note however that Hegel’s goal, in seeking to establish
knowledge beyond Kant’s limits, is not to establish knowledge of an absolutely
unconditioned and unified totality of everything—nor to establish knowledge of
anything accessible only to divine intuition grasping reality immediately and
all at
once.38
It remains Hegel’s ambition to dismiss the very idea of objects knowable only
by divine intuition, such as “that absolute of which we know nothing
except that in it all is one”; “things in themselves” in this sense are
supposed to be “nothing but truthless, empty abstractions.” This ambition is
supposed to be compatible with the one announced in the very next sentence:
the Logic aims to establish knowledge of things in themselves in the
sense sketched immediately above—knowledge of the more fundamental features of
things which explain their behavior. For example, knowledge of the natural
kinds in virtue of which different things are governed by necessary laws. More
generally, this is knowledge of “what something is in its
Begriff”:

What, however, the thing in itself is in truth, what truly is
in itself, of this logic is the exposition, in which however something better
than an abstraction is understood by 'in itself', namely, what something is in
its concept (in seinem Begriffe).

And the two ambitions will be compatible so long as Hegel can
show that the all the Begriffe or “universal determinations” he
introduces are not accessible only to divine intuition, but are—as he
immediately adds—“comprehensible”
(begreiflich) and “cognizable”
(erkennbar) (WL 5:130/121).

Furthermore, Hegel’s two ambitions here are not merely
compatible; together they define a unified project in theoretical philosophy,
or a unified, extended argument-strategy. To see how, recall Kant’s
“Transcendental Dialectic” argument. Kant argues that we can have knowledge
only within the bounds of experience. And the faculty of reason is supposed to
be unsatisfied by any such knowledge, and to seek the very opposite: we can
have knowledge, mediated by the forms of our sensible intuition, of
objects conditioned in space and time; reason seeks knowledge of the
unconditioned, which would be possible only for intellectual intuition
grasping reality immediately and all at once. Insofar as we cannot know
but must conceive of the unconditioned, we must conceive it as “present in
things insofar as we are not acquainted with them, as things in
themselves”—and so must conclude that our knowledge is limited or restricted
(Bxx).

But if Hegel is right that we can have explanatory
knowledge beyond Kant’s bounds of sense, beginning with knowledge of natural
laws governing specifically distinct kinds, then why continue to hold that the
pursuit of explanatory insight must always seek a form of knowledge in
principle unavailable to us? Hegel will argue that reason’s goal, by contrast,
must not by understood as something knowable only by divine intuition grasping
reality immediately and all at once. If Hegel can account for reason’s goal
without appeal to anything like Kant’s distinction between two utterly
distinct kinds of intellect, then he can further show that there is no in
principle barrier between our own knowledge and the kind of knowledge we seek
in all theoretical inquiry. If so, then Hegel can undermine Kant’s conclusion
that such a barrier forces us to hold that our own knowledge is fundamentally
limited or restricted, or that we can have no knowledge of things as they are
in themselves. Or, Hegel can eliminate Kant’s reasons for thinking that we
must take seriously the idea of objects of intellectual intuition. So Hegel
seeks to surpass one Kantian limit precisely in order to eliminate
another: he seeks to show that our explanatory knowledge so far exceeds
Kant’s bounds of experience that no need remains to conceive of objects of
divine intuition, relative to which we would be merely limited. Hegel seeks to
establish knowledge of things in themselves (in the first sense) precisely
in order to dismiss the whole idea of things in themselves (in the
second).

We can already anticipate that one general line of Hegelian
argument toward this end will focus on determinacy. To see the point,
first consider one of Hegel’s arguments against the form of monism sketched
above: Say we begin by holding that everything real must be grounded in an
absolutely unified and unconditioned totality or whole. Hegel will argue that
such an absolutely unified and unconditioned totality could not ground any
determinate, differentiated or diverse phenomena. So if nothing can be
real that is not so grounded, then monists of this sort are supposed to be
forced to conclude (whatever their intentions) that all determinate,
differentiated or diverse phenomena are unreal. For example, Spinoza is
supposed to lose “all determinate content” into an “abyss”; the same point
applies to those of Hegel’s contemporaries who assert that there is an
“absolute” in which “all is
one.”39
It would of course require more attention to adequately explain, let alone to
defend, this line of argument. But the introductory sections of the
Encyclopedia clearly aim to prepare for that argument: Hegel here
claims that philosophy must set aside “abstract principles,” such as “in the
absolute all is one,” in favor of the determinacy provided by the “empirical
sciences,” which have “prepared the material for philosophy by finding
universal determinations, kinds, and laws” (§12An).

And it is easy to see how Hegel aims to argue, from here, that
the goal by which reason guides our theoretical inquiry cannot be anything
akin to knowledge of an absolutely unified and unconditioned totality. If the
object of such knowledge would be too abstract or indeterminate explain the
determinate phenomena of the world, then clearly this cannot be what we
are seeking when we pursue explanatory insight into such phenomena. Perhaps
the goal of reason is akin to what Kant calls a “systematic unity of nature.”
But, if so, then the systematic unity of nature would have to differ in
important respects from an unconditioned totality of everything. It would have
to be, at least in respect of its determinacy, more akin to the natural
laws governing specifically distinct natural kinds. But, if so, then we lose
Kant’s reasons for claiming that the knowledge which reason seeks would be
knowledge possible only for divine intuition. And then conceiving of the goal
of theoretical inquiry will not require us to entertain or take seriously the
conception of objects knowable only by divine intuition. In Hegel’s terms,
Kant’s argument for the limitation of our knowledge depends on taking the goal
of reason to be the unconditioned in the sense of something opposed to or
other than the determinate. Hegel says:

Our empirical cognitions are not appropriate for this identity
that lacks determinations altogether … When an unconditioned of this
sort is accepted as the absolute and the truth of reason (or as the idea),
then, of course, our empirical awareness is declared to be untrue, to be
appearance. (§45)

But if Hegel can justify an alternative account of the goal of
reason, as something that is determinate and not accessible only to divine
intuition, then he can eliminate Kant’s grounds for taking seriously the idea
of divine intuition and its objects, leaving us without grounds for thinking
that we are limited to knowledge of appearance, or that we cannot know things
as they are in themselves.

To be sure, the proof is in the pudding, and I have focused
here only on Hegel’s introduction of his project. Hegel’s execution naturally
raises many further issues not touched on here. For example, Hegel’s initial
case for the reality and knowability of natural laws governing specifically
distinct kinds does not get much beyond defending, against empiricist and
Kantian worries, some natural intuitions about laws, kinds and explanation.
But Hegel’s criticism of appeals to immediate knowledge, supposed to require
no justification, will require him to provide more than initial intuitions. It
will require him to extend from here to some more robust philosophical defense
of the reality and knowability of “universal determinations,” including first
of all the natural kinds and laws discussed here.

Second, understanding Hegel’s execution would require attention
to his arguments that there are limitations of natural laws and kinds, or
limitations of his own introductory examples of “universal determinations” or
Begriffe—and in particular to his argument, against Kant, that we can
have access to a more complete form of explanatory knowledge insofar as we can
explain the structure and development of living beings in teleological
terms.40
My own view is that Hegel is not here arguing that the whole of
everything is itself an organism, or teleologically organized. Rather, he is
arguing that reality consists of distinct and determinate levels, arranged
hierarchically and corresponding with different forms of explanation—so that,
for example, everything is composed of material parts explicable in
mechanistic terms, and some (not all) matter is also part of living
beings explicable in teleological terms. We are supposed to be able to gain
knowledge of the whole of everything, then, not by breaking through to a
higher standpoint from which an otherwise hidden unity of the whole becomes
apparent, but rather by pursuing a form of philosophical inquiry into
different levels of explanation and the relations between them. But, needless
to say, this material and these issues require separate discussion.

And third, Hegel’s execution is supposed to achieve a
philosophical benefit not discussed here: If Hegel can successfully break the
connection between the goal of reason and divine intuition, then he can try to
justify reason’s pursuit of that goal by showing that there is some
sense in which the world itself answers to such pursuit. This kind of
justification would no longer need to involve any assertion of knowledge
accessible only to divine intuition. And this is just what Hegel seeks to do.
In Hegel’s terms, “reason” does not just refer to a faculty of ours, which
sets or projects a goal for us to seek; it refers to the ideal form of
intelligibility of which theoretical inquiry generally seeks knowledge. And
Hegel seeks to demonstrate that the world answers to “reason” in this sense;
he seeks to show that this sort of ideal intelligibility or “reason” is
realized “in the
world.”41
Insofar as this means showing that a goal or standard providing the point of
absolutely all theoretical inquiry is itself not merely a goal of ours,
but is realized in the world, Hegel seeks to defend an account of what he
calls simply “the
absolute.”42
But I have not discussed here Hegel’s reasons for thinking that philosophy
should and even must pursue such an account, so that the lack of an account of
“the absolute” would be an important philosophical disadvantage of competing
views—so that Kant’s denial of the possibility of knowledge of the reality of
the objects ultimately of interest to reason would turn out to be a
philosophical disadvantage.

My point here, however, has not been to follow the execution of
Hegel’s project. The point is rather that following Hegel’s execution will
require first an understanding of the basic goals of his project in
theoretical philosophy. And this understanding can be impeded if we limit
ourselves to debating whether Hegel’s project involves a revival or
rather a rejection of the kinds of metaphysical ambitions criticized by
Kant. For it is essential to Hegel’s project that it involves both.
More specifically, if Kant’s distinction between intellectual intuition and
the finite discursive understanding is a false dichotomy, then we can
naturally understand the target of Kant’s criticisms in two different ways. On
the one hand, we can see Kant’s critical revolution as targeting metaphysics
in the sense of accounts which assert knowledge of divine intuition, or
knowledge that there really is some highest being accessible only to a divine
grasp of reality immediately and all at once. Hegel embraces Kant’s critical
revolution, understood in this manner, and so rejects claims that the totality
of all reality might be a unified whole providing an unconditioned ground for
everything real. Hegel specifically complains that most of his contemporaries
merely revert to such uncritical forms of metaphysics. On the other
hand, we can also understand the critical revolution as targeting metaphysics
in the sense of accounts which assert knowledge of objects beyond Kant’s
bounds of experience. Perhaps some contemporary philosophers find appealing
the idea of entirely rejecting “metaphysics” in this second sense. But this is
no reason to view Hegel through such a contemporary lens, or to prefer a
“non-metaphysical” reading. Rather, we must recognize that Hegel seeks to
establish the reality and knowability of objects beyond Kant’s bounds of
sense. Hegel ambitiously violates Kant’s restrictions on metaphysics (in the
second sense) specifically in order to complete what he sees as Kant’s
unfinished revolution the metaphysics of divine intuition (metaphysics in the
first sense): Hegel seeks to defend an account of things as they are in
themselves specifically designed to eliminate all remaining role or room for
the idea of a divine immediate grasp of reality—even and especially the
Kantian role of articulating the goal of reason and the limitation of our
knowledge.43

Primary Texts and Abbreviations

Kant: I use the translations of Kant’s works in the
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, altering where necessary, and
citing according to the following abbreviations: A/B=Critique of Pure
Reason (Guyer-Wood translation 1998); MAN=Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science (Friedman 2002); KU=Critique of the Power of Judgment
(Guyer-Mathews translation 2000); UE=“On a Discovery…” (Allison translation
2002 in Theoretical Philosophical after…); TP= “On a Recently Prominent
Tone…” (Heath translation 2002 in Theoretical Philosophical
after…). VR=“Lectures on the Philosophical
Doctrine of Religion” (Wood translation 1996 in Religion and Rational
Theology); Ak=Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften edition of Kants
gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902ff). Except for the first
Critique A/B pagination, all page references are to AK volume:page.
Translations altered where necessary.

Hegel: I use the following abbreviations and
translations, altering where necessary: §=EncyclopediaLogic
(Geraets, Harris and Suchting translation 1991, Hackett);
PG=Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller translation 1977, OUP); WL=
Science of Logic (Miller translation [1969] 1989,
Humanities Press); VGP=Lectures on the History of
Philosophy (Haldane-Simson translation 1995, University of Nebraska
Press); W=Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s Werke
(edited by Moldenhauer-Michel) 1970-1. In the case of the case of the
Encyclopedia I cite § number, and ‘An’ indicates Hegel’s remarks, ‘Zu’
indicates the Zusätze. In all other cases I cite from W volume:page
followed by the volume (if applicable) and page in the English translation
listed here. Translations altered where necessary.

Friedman, M. (2001)
“Matter and motion in the Metaphysical
Foundations and the first
Critique: The Empirical Concept of Matter and
the Categories”. In Kant and the
Sciences. Ed. E.
Watkins. 53-69. (New York: Oxford University Press).

1
On Hegel as advocating a modification of Spinoza’s monism, see Horstmann
(2006a; 2006b; 1991 165ff.) and Beiser (2005; 1993).

2
Hegel “accepts much of Kant’s criticism of the ‘dogmatic’ tradition” (Pippin
1989, 9); he seeks not a metaphysically realist account of “being as it is
in itself” (97) but to render “epistemically idle” Kant’s “skepticism”
concerning things in themselves (250). Also Pinkard (1996). And compare
McDowell on eliminating boundaries from within: e.g. “it is central to
Absolute Idealism to reject the idea that the conceptual realm has an outer
boundary” (1994, 44).

3
Kant refers to “everything intuited in space and time, hence all objects of
an experience possible for us” (A490-1/B519-20). Note that the categories do
not delimit the bounds of experience; they could, in themselves,
legitimately extend farther if given another source of intuition (B148).

4
On the synthetic status of the principles of the understanding, and the
connection to temporality, see Allison (2004, 225-8).

5
See the “Second Analogy,” and with respect to space: “reality in space, i.e.
matter, is likewise something conditioned, whose inner conditions are
its parts” (A413/B440).

11
Ameriks 1990. Note that the point of transcendental idealism itself is
not that “objects can be intelligible only as ‘relative’ to
the concepts, or systems of concepts, or theories, that we ‘impose’”
(Ameriks 2003, 102). Kant does hold that all knowledge of objects requires
concepts (A51/B75). But “transcendental idealism” itself concerns the
limitation or restriction imposed specifically by our sensible intuition
and its specific forms. But to insist on this point is not to commit to
any response to further controversies about how transcendental idealism is
to be further understood, for example, whether it involves any ontological
claims about the real existence of unknowable entities.

12
Some who address Hegel’s development interpret his late work as transforming
Kant’s idea of an “intuitive understanding” (Baum
1990, 173; Düsing 1986, 125 and Longuenesse 2000, 234). Insofar as this
means that Hegel’s late work aims to establish knowledge beyond what is
possible for a “discursive” understanding, as described by Kant, it is
undoubtedly correct. But it is equally important that Hegel’s late work does
not aim to assert the reality of anything knowable only by grasping
reality immediately and all at once. I take such immediacy to be
central to Kant’s idea of an “intuitive understanding,” so I would not
describe Hegel as preserving the central positive content of that Kantian
idea. For Kant on the connection between this idea and the sort of immediacy
rejected by Hegel, see e.g. “the understanding of God is intuitive … this
being must rather intuit all things immediately through its understanding,
and cognize everything at once” (VR 28:1051).

13
VGP 20:434-5/3:525. On this line of argument see Westphal 1989a and 2000.

14
These passages are from VGP 20:327/3:421 and EL, §41Zu 8:115/82,
respectively, with the emphasis in both added by me. Here I agree
emphatically with the Kantian readings: “Hegel accepts much of Kant’s
criticism of the ‘dogmatic’ tradition, and in particular rejects a reliance
on the classical notion of intellectual intuition” (Pippin 1989, 9). And see
Pinkard (1996, 14). See also Redding: “The very opposition that Kant has
between finite human thought and infinite godly thought is suspect” (2002,
section 3.2).

15
Recall Kant’s formulation: “we had to have in mind another possible
intuition if we were to hold our own to be a special kind, namely one that
is valid of objects merely as appearances” (KU 5:406).

16
Hegel associates monism of this sort with Spinoza (W 16:99) and with
Schelling and his followers (PG 3:22/9; §12An; WL 5:120/113; 5:130/121). I
do not defend Hegel’s interpretations here, but with respect to Spinoza note
his argument that substance is indivisible (Ethics IP13), and his
clarification in terms of a distinction between two ways of grasping
substance: substance as known by intellect as opposed to imagination
is indivisible (Ethics IP15S). With respect to Schelling see: “if
we could view everything that is in the totality, we would perceive … a pure
identity in which nothing is distinguishable” (DMS 4:128). And this
“absolute identity” is “unconditioned,” (DMS 4:119) and the “ground of
reality” (DMS 4:146).

17
Hegel recognizes that Kant is defending “objective” knowledge in the sense
of knowledge of “what is externally present, as distinct from what is only
subjective, meant, dreamed, etc” (§41Zu).

18
Kant aims to justify teleological judgment specifically as “a heuristic
principle for researching the particular laws of nature, even granted that
we would want to make no use of it for explaining nature itself” (KU 5:411).
Kant denies the possibility of our explaining living beings or
anything natural in teleological terms (also KU 5:360 and 5:417).

19
On causality and causal laws, see A91/B124. more generally, “this necessity
of laws is inseparably attached to the concept of nature” (MAN 4:469).

24
On the importance of reducibility, I agree with Nayak and Sotnak (1995,
147-150). Note that in MAN Kant is not optimistic about the prospects for
such progress in chemistry, though he is more optimistic in the last years
of his life; see Friedman 1992b, 264ff.

25
On this limit see especially Friedman 1992a, on this passage specifically at
p. 190.

26
“We cannot speak of proving those ‘laws’. The claim that they
legislate for unactualized possibilities is always fallible” (Kitcher 1986,
230). “Fully determinate knowledge of empirical laws can never be more than
a regulative ideal” (Guyer 1990, 222). And see the citations from Friedman
in the next note below.

28
Westphal argues that the doctrine of “transcendental affinity”—and the
connected “law of genera” from the appendix to the “Transcendental
Dialectic”—conflicts with Kant’s transcendental idealism (Westphal 2004,
87ff.) and with Kant’s own official view of the limits of our a
priori knowledge (100), anticipating a later “post-critical” phase
(174). See also Edwards (2000). I do not seek to defend or to presuppose any
claims here about the Opus postumum.

30
See the citation from §21Zu in the following paragraph, and also: nature “is
unalterably governed (regiert) by universal
laws” (W 12:23).

31
See for example the argument of “Sense Certainty” in the
Phenomenology.

32
Hegel refers here to his earlier argument, in the “Relation of Skepticism to
Philosophy,” for the superiority of ancient to modern skepticism which is
not skeptical about “feeling and intuition” (§39).

33
For contemporary use of similar terms, see Beebee (2000) on the
“descriptive” or “non-governing” conception of laws, and Loewer “it is more
apt to say” that laws “summarize events” (1996, 114).

34
Similar arguments show up in recent philosophy: First, the explanatory
import of laws rules out Humean accounts of natural laws (Dretske 1977;
Armstrong 1983, 40-1). Second, Humean accounts must be rejected specifically
because they would rule out the possibility of our having knowledge of
natural laws (1983, 52ff.).

35
E.g. Kant adopts a “Humean standpoint, the standpoint that proclaims the
thinking of our perceptions to be inadmissible; i.e. the eliciting of
the universal and necessary out of these perceptions” (§50). Hegel is
over-reaching here: Kant holds that such thinking is necessary and
justified, denying only that it yields theoretical knowledge of determinate
universal laws; but this denial is what Hegel seeks to overturn.

36
For example, Kant argues in this way to limit the extent to which the
categories allow knowledge at (B309/A253). On the central role of
discursivity in Kant, and on this as the basic argument in support of it,
see especially Allison (2004, 14ff.).

37
On this activity of thought, see §21ff. For more on Hegel on immanent
universals, see especially Westphal (1989b, ch. 10) and Stern (1990).

38
For this reason, although I agree with Friedman’s account of a post-Kantian
dissatisfaction with what came to seem an “intolerable skepticism” in Kant’s
position, I think it important to resist giving a common interpretation
Hegel’s and Schelling’s responses (2006, 34). Hegel’s response needs to be
understood in light of his criticisms of what he sees as the most
popular responses of his contemporaries, including Schelling.

39
§151Zu. On Spinoza see also WL 5:121/214; 5:179/161. On the absolute in
which all is one, see PG 3:22/9.

40
See especially this series of sections near the end of the Logic:
“Mechanism”, “Chemism”, “Teleology”, and “Life.” I provide an account of
Hegel’s argument for the priority of teleology over mechanism in (Kreines
2004); and an account of Hegel’s defense of natural teleology in (Kreines
forthcoming).

42
Note for example Hegel’s use of the term “absolute” in discussing Kant’s
account of reason and the unconditioned at §§44-5.

43
For comments on and assistance with this material, I thank audiences at the
Central APA; Claremont McKenna College; Cornell University; University of
California, Irvine; and the University of Kansas. I also benefited from
editorial and referee comments provided by this journal, and also comments
from: Andrew Chignell, Michael Della Rocca, Robert Guay, Simon Lumsden,
Jamie Martin, Robert Pippin, Paul Redding, and Allen Wood.